CMO Circle: Crafting Tailor-Made Triumphs in the New World of Business

Dave: Yeah. So there are several, a lot of which stem from the concept of customer data platforms. So leading vendors out there like Snowflake and a lot of that started with just bringing together marketing data, but now there are tools that can bring in a broader range of data.

So for example, one company that I have worked with is called Narrative and they have a tool called Rosetta, as in the Rosetta Stone. And what it can do is you point it at one data set and it understands its schema, point it at another data set, understand that schema and then it writes the code to combine and normalize the data into a repository.

So for example, Snowflake now uses Narrative as a front end to bring together completely disparate data and normalize it at a customer level. The Trade Desk uses this in order to import data from customers who want to bring in their data and combine it with the Trade Desk data in order to target programmatic buying. So this is one example. I am sure there are others. This just happens to be one I know where in just hours, instead of hiring consultants who would take 18 months to put together the ultimate data store, you can now bring that data together. And that opens up all kinds of possibilities for what you can understand about a customer.

Another example is a different kind of tool that was just bought by Genesis, the call center company. The tool was originally called Point-A-List and it can track your interactions deliberately across all the touches you’ve had with a company, your journey. So for example, you call in with a problem because you were trying to pay your bill on the app and you had a problem. So it knows that you were just on the app, that you just had a problem and that information gets to the call center. And if that’s a new problem that they haven’t seen yet, the rep is at least aware of where you’ve been and can get access to information about what’s going on with the app. If it’s a problem that others have had, They may have already figured out how to solve it and that information could get pumped in real-time right to the rep. And so you can actually track people and bring together that data, which is all in different places much more easily than you could before.

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Challenges That Come With Company-Wide Personalization 

Michelle: Yeah, I think that’s definitely a big pain point for customers. I hate having to, you know, if you have an issue, you call in, you have to explain it to the rep and then they might transfer you and they have to explain it again and up and up you go, you know. But besides the data, which I think is a really big challenges that most companies face when they’re trying to use personalization, what other kind of challenges do you see pop up when they’re trying to make personalization a company-wide effort?

Dave: Yeah, a lot of it just has to do with the coordination of different departments. And like I said, it really takes a village. It’s not just a marketing thing to make these kinds of capabilities happen. So for example, I’ll give you another one and I’m actually going to compare two companies. So in the B2B world, this is also a big deal. So Cisco, which is a food delivery company. So you see their trucks all over the place delivering food to eating establishments. Now, when a buyer at an eating establishment opens the Cisco app, within 300 milliseconds, that app knows who the buyer is, the restaurant, what their menu is, their price points, whether they buy in bulk or spot, where they are geographically, what the nearest warehouse is, what that warehouse has in stock, maybe what they have too much of in stock that they want to discount in order to move because it’s food and food is perishable.

And so that buyer gets all of that information, including recommendations for new menu items they might want to consider in order to take advantage of price discounts. And having interviewed some of the customers, it’s really powerful that they can have all that capability. But putting that app together requires many different parts of Cisco to work together. At a minimum, you’ve got the ecommerce side that has to be connected with the supply chain side really tightly. There’s marketing in order to figure out the pricing and the promotions that you want to actually show. And all of that has to come together with a common IT backbone, so the technology team has to be involved. Whereas other distributors that I’ve worked with, it’s hard to bring all of that together. So yes, there’s a data issue, but it’s just getting the different departments working together, spending the time to rethink that whole customer experience.

You know, for example, let’s take it one more step. If somebody from Cisco who’s a buyer calls in and has a question, then you want to get all that information to the rep so that the rep can handle that call. Well, that’s not necessarily easy. If the reps haven’t been trained and if the call center systems haven’t been made available to accommodate moving that data. So there’s a coordination that has to happen in operations. Which is why we believe, and there’s a whole chapter in our book about roles across the C-suite, and marketing may end up being the quarterback to coordinate this, but there’s roles of everybody who has to contribute different aspects of either the operations or the technology, even the general counsel. I mean, things like data privacy policies and legal use of certain content. All of that has to be part of this as well.

So it’s that other part of coordination that is where a lot of companies struggle as well.

The CMO as the Quarterback of Personalization 

Michelle: I’d like to talk more about that idea of the CMO being the quarterback, taking that center stage from a strategy perspective. What does that look like in practice?

Dave: Yeah. So I think personalization is a tremendous opportunity for CMOs to take the lead strategically. Too often in a lot of companies, the marketing organization is seen as what I call “lunch net” where they get orders. “Give us an email for this. Give us a campaign for this.” And marketing is a bit more downstream. They have a fixed budget. They’re trying to figure out how to use that fixed budget, but they get a lot of demands. And it’s hard for marketing to put themselves in the role of strategic leader of saying, “Here’s the goals of the company financially. Let me show you the art of the possible of how marketing can directly contribute to those goals.”

Personalization is an area where that can happen because marketing can understand, prioritize use cases. Where are the actual problems, the problems that become opportunities? If we can fix those problems, get rid of a lot of the friction in how our customers are using our products or buying from us. Marketing has the insight on the customer. They should. They should be bringing that voice of the customer into the room. I often feel that marketing brings the oxygen of customer insights because oxygen, it’s what you need to drive growth is the customer insights that help you come up with innovation.

And so marketing also has, should have an understanding of the customer data involved in terms of the brand positioning and the opportunity to move that brand positioning. And they can actually be in the pole position to coordinate all the different things that need to happen once you start prioritizing use cases. And I had that role when I was chief marketing officer at Aetna.

Even though I was chief marketing officer, I had customer experience also and helped build that. And a lot of it, especially in healthcare had to be driven towards personalization. And so every two months on the strategy agenda. So we got together as leadership team every month. Every other month I had an hour and a half on the agenda to talk about customer experience and personalization, where we were, what were issues that we needed to discuss, trade-offs, problems we should solve together, resource issues, things we needed to coordinate and others had roles to play, especially in the call center, in the data centers. Compliance was a huge issue that we had to pull in.

So this was an opportunity to really take a lead from a strategy perspective, and from my discussions with other CMOs and companies I do a lot of consulting that I’ve worked with, I’m seeing those CMOs being able to rise to the occasion.

Michelle: I think that’s really interesting because one of the questions that we’ve asked a lot or we’ve heard other people ask is who owns the customer experience? Is it marketing? Is it sales? Is it the whole organization? So it’s interesting to see how you have that customer experience lead when you were in your role.

Dave: Yeah. And I’m seeing, you know, there’s a lot of different titles and there’s titles all over the place. Chief experience officer, chief customer officer, you know, and they all have different combinations of things, but experience is totally tied to the role of marketing because marketing is about coordinating in the customer’s mind, how they experience a brand’s promise. And it’s really about changing customer behavior as a result of connecting with them about a brand’s promise.

And it’s not just simply what you put into an ad and the content of an ad, but it’s the total experience that affects a customer’s brand image. So experience is absolutely critical. And I’ve long believed that the customer journey, really thinking through, how to create a branded, differentiated customer journey. Someone’s got to take the lead. Marketing is in a terrific position to do that, given the customer insights that they should have access to and the voice of the customer they should be bringing to the table.

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The Changes Needed to Be All-In on Personalization 

Michelle: So you have a CMO and they want to implement a corporate-wide personalization strategy. What kind of structural or cultural changes might they need to push for to make that happen?

Dave: Yeah, I think a lot of it starts also with what do you want to personalize? Where do you begin? And so one thing you’ve got to start with, and I guess this is culturally, is to start with what are the use cases? What are the things we act on instead of just saying we’re going to personalize? That’s a broad statement. That’s going to cost you a lot of money. What are the experiences we want to make clearly personalized, where we want to use customer information to change the value we’re delivering with to our customers so that they perceive that value is coming from their information and that we’re able to make it better as we learn more. We can delight them as we learn more. So one thing is focusing on use cases and understanding what is the business value of getting to those use cases.

Then with that, working with the leadership team to start thinking through pilots and getting a team together from the relevant functions. And this may have structural implications where you’re getting folks from different teams working together in a fast cycle way. We call it agile operations based on the way agile has been used in software. You can apply that to business operations. You can even apply it to day-to-day marketing, but that’s a whole other discussion. But you get a group of people who are focused on testing and figuring out how to implement operationally that particular use case with as little capability as possible, essentially a minimum lovable experience instead of minimum viable product, minimum lovable experience so that they can start seeing what’s really needed to scale it and start getting the rhythm of working together.

And I’ll give you an example of this. When I was chief marketing officer at Aetna, one of the things we quickly realized hurt our brand and frankly hurts the whole insurance business is people don’t understand their healthcare. They don’t understand how their health insurance works. They don’t understand premiums, copays, coinsurance, deductibles, all of that. It’s complicated. We did research, like 7% of people understood all those terms. It was ridiculous. And because they don’t understand it, they call and they’re not happy. They call into the call center. It costs us money. It costs our members money because they make bad decisions. Going out of network when they could have been in network, going to an emergency room and they could have gone to an urgent care center.

And so we needed to educate them and we had to figure out how to do it in order to improve the brand. And so a team, so I said, we got to prioritize education. If legally we can’t simplify the product, then we at least have to educate people. So we got a team together that combined customer service, compliance and marketing. And we started looking to figure out what are options we can do.

We came across a company called Sunday Sky that does personalized videos. And this was before full-gen AI. So these were really simple animated videos, but they were personalized and they would be able to explain to, Michelle, exactly her health plan, who in her family is covered. Do they have a primary care physician or not? If not, here’s five in your area that are accepting new patients that are in network, click here to set up an appointment and so on. And explained all the economics and everything.

And it was a total home run. Seventy percent of people watch the whole video, calls to the call center went down by over 20%, people even opened up our emails more as a result because they trusted us and felt the brand bond but it took a team working together to make that work, because people might have even called into the call center about one of these videos, and you know we had to have it all lined up and coordinated. We have to the information tied in but it set the stage and it was successful

So then we set up four more of these different teams focused on different aspects of the customer experience. And they eventually spread when CVS bought in, it spread to even more aspects of the company. But that was a structural thing as well as a cultural thing of saying, let’s get a cross-functional team focused on an aspect of the customer experience, infuse it with as much personalization as possible but test and learn because we don’t know out of the gate what’s going to work.

How to Build Trust and Avoid Creepy Personalization 

Michelle: We have time for one more question and it’s a pretty important one so I don’t want to skip over it. Trust is a really big factor when it comes to using customer data. Customers are so wary anymore that companies are going to sell their data, they’re going to use it for nefarious purposes, or there’s going to be personalization that’s creepy. So how can CMOs make sure that the data that they use for personalization is used in a way that builds and maintains trust?

Dave: Yeah, I think you have to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. The creepy factor is very real. And if you think about the Sungevity example, the solar panels, you could look at that two ways. You know, you could say that was creepy that they had all this information, but a large part of the population said that’s information that’s out there. I know it’s public and it’s being used to help me.

So the number one thing. You have to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and say, is this feeling manipulative or is this something that actually is adding value to the customer? So I wrote the book together with the head of the marketing practice at BCG and they do an annual survey of consumers attitudes towards customer data.

Seventy percent of people, and this is across all age groups on average, it’s even higher for younger people, are comfortable with marketers using information about them in ways that they feel creates value for themselves, that they feel helps them. The same token though, 75%, a higher number, and I’m sure there’s overlap, have said they’ve stopped doing business with a brand that they thought was using their information inappropriately, or creepily, as we might say. And so it works both ways.

So you’ve got to have a strong sense of what these use cases are going to be, how people are going to perceive it, guardrails on how that information is used. One of the things that I’m seeing more and more companies doing is just simply asking you. And you don’t have to tell them, but you can ask.

When I moved, Home Depot started bombarding me with all kinds of stuff. And then finally they asked, what’s your next project? And I said, bathroom renovation. So, okay, so things could start getting more relevant. So ask, you know, sometimes consumers will be very happy to do that. And they know that it’s going to be in everyone’s best interest to do so. And that we call that zero-party information. And one of the things in the book is we get into different levels of information, zero, first, second, third party information. Pros and cons of each and how you collect and manage that and what’s going on even legally with a lot of those. But zero party data just asking people. If they trust you, they’ll tell you and then you’ve got it and you should use it on their behalf.

Michelle: Yeah, I think that’s a great strategy. People are going to give it away willingly, and if it’s relevant to them, they’ll be happy.

Well, thank you so much for being with me here today. It was really great chatting with you, and I think that you’ve given people a lot to think about.

Dave: It’s a great opportunity for chief marketing officers. You know, given the audience who’s listening here, I think to break through strategically as a marketer and shape the value proposition of your company based on how you’re using customer data to deliver value. That is tremendous. And CMOs have got to be thinking about that at the same time they’re working on all these different ways to use AI to get more efficient. That’s real. But think about the strategic opportunities here. That’s why we wrote the book. And I’d love to hear more stories about how companies are using this to really change the game.

Michelle: Thanks, Dave.

Dave: Thank you, Michelle.

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